Еlena

✞ • a third culture kid, perpetual optimist & zk maxi • @presto_labs @okx • posts on digital assets and random interests. 25.

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

Can zcash:native actually verify it's own money as privacy coin?

We are so far along to the ultimate privacy protocol, but zcash gave it's decent start.

But why privacy coin hunters are dumping zcash:native beyond the claude opus 4.8 critical vulnerability expose?

1. The anonymity set is small, which directly weakens the protocol

People assume strong proofs equal strong privacy. They do not. Privacy is a function of the math AND the crowd size. zk-SNARKs give you perfect unlinkability inside the shielded pool, but unlinkability only means "you cannot be distinguished from the other people in the pool." If the pool is small or low-activity, the set you are hiding in is small.

Concretely: roughly 30% of ZEC supply was shielded as of 2025. But supply shielded is not the relevant number. What matters for privacy is transaction activity, how many shielded-to-shielded transactions are happening in the same time window as yours. A large dormant shielded balance gives you almost no cover, because cover comes from concurrent activity, not stored value. If only a handful of shielded transactions clear in the window around yours, an analyst is correlating across a tiny set. The math says you are anonymous. The usage says you are one of five. ZEC cannot fix the anonymity set by improving the cryptography, because the cryptography is already excellent. It can only fix it by driving real shielded usage up, and it has failed to do that for nearly a decade. The potential weakness is on demand side.

2. Optional privacy poisons as the default

When privacy is opt-in, using it becomes a signal. On Monero, everyone is private, so being private tells an observer nothing. On Zcash, choosing to shield marks you as someone who wanted to hide something, within a minority of users who do. The act of opting in is itself information.

This produces a perverse dynamic. The more sensitive your reason for wanting privacy, the more your use of the rare feature stands out against the transparent majority. Optional privacy means the privacy-seekers self-select into a smaller, more conspicuous group. Monero's mandatory model dissolves that signal entirely. Zcash's optional model concentrates it. The feature that is supposed to protect you also flags you, because most people around you are not using it.

3. The shielded boundary leaks by design

Most ZEC value needs to touch the transparent world. Exchanges deposit and withdraw transparent. Most wallets, most liquidity, most on-ramps are transparent. So value flows in a pattern: transparent, shield, do something private, unshield, transparent again.

Every shield and unshield event is visible on-chain with an amount and a timestamp. The shielded middle is private. The two ends are not. This creates correlation attacks. Shield 12.7 ZEC at 14:02, and an unshield of 12.7 ZEC appears at 14:40, a chain analyst has a linkage hypothesis. With low pool activity (see point 1) these hypotheses get strong fast, because there are few other transactions to create ambiguity.

This is structural because the protocol cannot close it without forcing all activity shielded, and it deliberately refuses to do that, because mandatory privacy is exactly what triggers delistings. So ZEC keeps the leaky boundary on purpose. The leak is the price of regulatory survival. It is not a bug they will patch. It is a design they chose.

4. The shielded pool sacrifices supply verifiability

This is the deepest one and the one this week made it concrete. A transparent chain lets anyone verify total supply matches protocol rules. A shielded pool gives that up. You cannot see the amounts, so you cannot confirm the amounts sum correctly.

For years this was a theoretical tradeoff. The Orchard bug converted it into a live liability. A soundness flaw let counterfeit ZEC be minted inside the pool with no on-chain trace, and because the pool hides amounts, there is no cryptographic way to prove after the patch whether it happened. The privacy did not just fail to help here. It is the specific reason the question is unanswerable. On Bitcoin, a counterfeit bug would leave a supply discrepancy anyone could check. On ZEC, the privacy guarantee erases exactly the evidence you would need.

So the structural compromise is this: privacy and provable integrity are the same axis pointing opposite directions. You cannot maximize both. Every unit of privacy ZEC provides is a unit of supply-verifiability it gives up. Most of the time nobody notices. When a soundness bug appears, that abandoned verifiability is precisely what you cannot get back.

If the team executes on the NU7 roadmap, faster blocks (75 seconds down to 25), and the Zashi and NEAR Intents UX improvements that are already moving real cross-chain volume into shielded ZEC, the set can grow.

At this moment, adoption is the only variable that matters, and it is the one thing within their control. They have not cleared it yet, but it is clearable, and unlike the regulatory and verifiability tensions, it does not require them to abandon what makes ZEC, ZEC.

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@NilTaskin “ You don’t need to build a man “ is something my dad always says.

Being emotionally supportive ≠ build and leverage women for their own ambitions.

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@zapatas_mom Real. Incoming angry men….

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@TobiasTBV LOL

[Megan Nyvold @MeganNyvold]

My hot take on Asian skincare being “better”:
- their genetics are simply better it’s not necessarily their topicals
- faster go to market than US for medical devices (laser, injectables etc)
- American market is flooded with crap. Sorry miss hailey beiber. We have good stuff just harder to sort through the junk
- normal to stay out of the sun/use spf regularly

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@mishkaivana Happy for you Michelle! This is great!

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@shaunmmaguire @ilyasut

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@shaunmmaguire Ilya Sutskever should hire Jensen Huang. Goats

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@MsRadicalIdeas He is a humble man by display. Went to street food shops across China/ Taiwan/ Singapore.

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

Men like to tame girl bosses. It’s power dynamic. Sex with 25 year old blonde Russian doll or ABGs are boring.

Nothing wrong with Applebees waiters it’s an honest job but a man at Jensen’s caliber wants to assert dominance and power rather than quenching physical thirst. It’s psychological.

[hot_cocoa_girl @hot_cocoa_girl]

Always the girlboss that gets to be the CEO’s mistress, never the Applebees virgin waitress

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

Jensen is out

Infidelity is obviously bad

But his contributions to American innovation and AI leadership cannot be overstated

Jensen started NVIDIA in 1993, where he pioneered the graphics chip market when this was non-obvious

Back in 2012, Ilya Sustkever trained AlexNet on NVIDIA GPUs — thereby creating the “deep learning” age

Jensen was one of the earliest to be AI pilled and he re-oriented NVDA towards AI in the mid 2010s — none of his competitors were even thinking this way

In 2020 he acquired Mellanox for $7B. This was an Israeli company that’s irrelevant for computer graphics but was essential for AI compute — wildly increasing the bandwidth between GPUs, necessary to build high performance AI server racks (rather than just good chips)

Once AI took off, Jensen was one of the biggest champions of the ecosystem

He was technical enough to be confident about where things were going, and had enough credibility as a founder CEO that he oftentimes made risky bets on next-generation technologies or companies that helped keep American AI on the efficient frontier

Recently he was investing in open source, photonics and robotics. These areas will all be feeling his loss

Earlier he was a champion of most of America’s leading AI companies when they were unproven

He made huge mistakes with his infidelity, which is tragic for his family and NVDA

But simultaneously he will leave a huge void, with the loss of a: technical, aggressive, founder-CEO

The American AI community needs to work double-time in an attempt to fill this void

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@jenzhuscott Super real. They will have Dario and team to cure every disease in less than a decade 💪

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@seanboisselle Think they had no choice

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@mirandanazzaro Someone’s so brave to leak all this from signal lol

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@Liathetrader Good tips!

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@valueandtime $ZEC I believe in this man or woman? to save my bags.

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

I’m afraid it’s close to over for the insane valuation frontier labs

$ANT IPO will be the cherry on top.

[NVIDIA Newsroom @nvidianewsroom]

NVIDIA announces CEO transition. Read the release: https://t.co/MTTUvFHCJA

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@LIWEI_TWCapital As someone who was in long term relationship with a single Taiwanese man, this is true.

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@algoflows Should’ve followed Elon’s playbook.

[dj lau @lauwaermer]

männlicher honeypot wesentlich schwieriger, weils direkt auffällig ist, wenn ein mann fragen stellt

[Еlena @thelucentbloom]

@AnnaEconomist 3) Extra performative and tries to cultivate good image all the time. “my wife bought me this jacket and i’ll always wear it”

His business is great, should stick with it and cut performative BS.